The Eternal Footman Page 30

  To kill a man. To stop his heart, desiccate his veins, obliterate his mind: for Gerard such an action was inconceivable. Even in the post-theistic West, a world overrun by ectoplasmic assassins, the concept of murder revolted him. He was a creator, not a destroyer—a sculptor, not a hit man.

  Braving the stench of the unburied abulics, he entered El Parque Crepúsculo. Eyes downcast, scores of mourners swarmed over the hills. A hundred gravediggers stabbed the earth with their spades. Only one landscape in Gerard’s experience could match this field of open tombs: the burning cemetery for arch-heretics that, in Circle VI, Dante discovered behind the subterranean walls of Dis.

  I now beheld within each sepulchre

  A ceaseless fire, a casket all aglow,

  Like metal ready for the blacksmith’s stroke.

  The coffins lay uncovered; from them poured

  Loud piercing groans that terribly revealed

  The anguish of the tortured souls within.

  As he parked the cart beside Malvina’s grave, Gerard saw that his first question had become irrelevant. Anna Fergus lay across the mound, eyes locked open, limbs stiff.

  He pushed Malvina’s cross into the soft ground and, rotating slowly, addressed the crowd in the loudest voice he’d used since castigating the cardinals at the Cinecittà opening.

  “Get out while you can!”

  A handful of mourners and sextons—those whose despondency didn’t preclude curiosity—looked up. Their faces seemed carved from basalt.

  “Lucido’s gone crazy!”

  They watched him with impassive eyes.

  “He’s planning to kill you all! Get out!”

  His audience stared at the wormy earth.

  Gerard fled the rotting metropolis, hurrying the pony south along Calle de la Aguila past adobe churches, stucco houses, banana farms, and a coffee plantation. The Mexican sun pummeled his brain; he sweated like a follower of Soaragid. His plan was simple. During his early days at El Dorado, he had periodically visited the lava lake atop the Volcán de Catemaco, seeking within its languid swirls the forms and faces of the Somatocist deities. He would go to the mountain again, consulting it now on an entirely different matter.

  The noon hour found him tethering the pony to a papaya root and ascending the smoldering slopes. He reached the inner crater, pulled the gas mask over his head, and stared into the crucible, looking for a sign. Nothing coherent emerged: the blobs remained amorphous, the bubbles meaningless. But then, at last, the contours of a man appeared in the lava—stark, emphatic, one hand gripping a chisel, the other raising a hammer, A sculptor. Himself.

  The augury seemed unambiguous. Assassinating Lucido was not his job. He was obligated instead to take up his tools and finish his magnum opus.

  Compounding the message’s urgency was the status of the volcano itself. Gerard was no geologist; he knew nothing of seismic events. And yet he sensed that a fatal impatience had seized the mountain. Its sulfurous fumes seemed thicker than usual, its ashes heavier, its lava more turbulent Like a frustrated artist or a fecund breast, Catemaco needed to express its juices, and soon.

  He returned to the pony, departed through a swirling mass of volcanic dust, and reached Oswald’s Rock at twilight Marching into the right hemisphere, he immediately set to work. It was his finest frenzy ever, and when it was over, the Hall of Artistic Passion had acquired a celebration of Vincent Van Gogh: the artist beholding Saint-Rémy by night—a heavenscape comprising a bright homed moon, eleven blazing stare, and a spiral nebula coiling across the sky like a dragon encrusted with a million jewels.

  Forty-eight hours after Nora’s first pulque odyssey, Goneril led her back to the Maya temple and took her on a second voyage. This new cocktail carried Nora not to Deus Absconditus itself but to the verge of an outlying wetland. Heaped between marsh and beach like mounds of raw sugar, a line of sand dunes sheltered the ecosystem from the crashing sea beyond. She was leaning against the balustrade of a wooden platform crowded with reverent bird-watchers and amateur watercolorists. Goneril stood beside her, peering through binoculars as intently as a piano prodigy’s mother observing her daughter’s first recital.

  “Migration season,” said the fetch as a flock of herons rose from the nearest mudflat. “The nomads are heading south.”

  They spent the morning contemplating the marsh—a dense biological symphony of terns, egrets, terrapins, scallops, horseshoe crabs, moon jellyfish, sea cucumbers, eelgrass, and thriving phytoplankton—then hiked to the nearest monorail station and jumped aboard an express train. Settling into the plush velour of the parlor car, the time travelers grew hypnotized by the passing terrain, the wetlands yielding to forests, the forests to dome-covered hydroponic gardens.

  “Private transportation did not die an easy death,” Goneril said, removing the laptop from her shoulder bag. She opened a file. “Homo Sapiens versus the Internal Combustion Engine was the World Court’s most significant case since the trial of God.” She consulted the screen. “All told, the two sides submitted 1,947 documents and solicited 5,419 pages of testimony over 211 days. When the fight was over, the justices issued a unanimous opinion, making automobiles as illegal as land mines.”

  In the seat across the aisle, two preadolescent boys swapped trading cards evidently inspired by the reubenite brain. Nora glimpsed Isaac Newton adjusting a prism, Charles Darwin studying the Galapagos finches, and Moby-Dick torpedoing the Pequod.

  “Once automobiles disappeared,” Goneril continued, “the world was halfway toward checking the greenhouse effect, with its threat of coastal flooding, massive crop failures, and devastating epidemics.”

  Now they were within the city limits, sailing across parks and promenades, bridges and levees, shops and theaters, synagogues and mosques, housing projects and sports complexes. Commissure Gardens came and went, as did Medulla Junction and seven other stops, until at last they reached Cerebellum Square, where Goneril had them detrain.

  “You have a question,” said the fetch. “You ask, ‘It’s all very well for the privileged West to reinvent itself as a wildlife preserve, but what about the remaining three-quarters of the world? Are pauper nations supposed to forego automobiles and industrialization for some nebulous squid-kisser ethos?’”

  “That problem did occur to me, yes.”

  “The solution will surprise you.”

  Strewn with litter, Cerebellum Square opened onto a waterfront replete with collapsing docks, abandoned warehouses, and gamey fragrances—more picturesque than depressing, Nora decided, like a set for a Bowery Boys movie. Goneril hustled them across a concrete quay toward Harry’s Sports Bar, a saloon perched on pylons above the Erasmus River. The sign in the window read DEONTOLOGY BOWL PARTY TODAY!!!!

  “I hate sports,” said Nora.

  “It’s not what you imagine,” said Goneril, leading her inside.

  For an establishment occupying a strange and far-flung future, almost everything about Harry’s Sports Bar felt familiar to Nora: the squall of the jukebox, the clack of the billiard balls, the waitresses ferrying pitchers of beer from the kegs to the crowded booths—even the air itself, heavy with alcohol fumes and torpid conversation. The only surprise was the scale of the TV monitors; they were as large as picture windows, one suspended over the kegs, the other commanding the riverside wall. Both screens displayed the same shot, a Latino announcer sitting in the bleachers of an outdoor sports arena, speaking inaudibly to the camera.

  “Live from Santiago, Chile—the Deontology Bowl!” noted Goneril, pointing to the riverside screen. “The whole world is watching. No athletic event on planet Earth matters more.”

  The scene shifted to the pregame parade. Banners flying, arms waving, hundreds of athletes, male and female, dressed in splendid liveries and wielding various point-scoring tools, strutted along a savanna of barbered grass. The off-screen orchestra played a march that managed to be stirring without sounding militaristic.

  Guiding Nora into a vacant booth, Goneril suggested
that they split a pitcher of black and tan. The beer arrived promptly, dark as molasses and crowned with foam. Sipping, Nora tried to hear the announcer’s words, but the thumping music and the chattering barflies drowned him out.

  Jesusball, Goneril explained, differed from pre-plague sports in that four teams competed in a single game, each team representing one of the planet’s major geopolitical spheres: the European Economic Community, the New Russia Consortium, the Industrialized Asia League, and the Confederated Provinces of America. The real competition, however, occurred not during the game itself but throughout the previous seven months, when the four spheres made secret monetary donations to various United Nations funds devoted to international poverty relief, Third World debt forgiveness, global-warming mitigation, and rain-forest salvation. After assessing a given sphere’s generosity, the International Jesusball Commission equipped that sphere’s team proportionately. Among the assets distributed by the Commission were performance-enhancing drugs, including vitaloids and hallucinogens; defensive gear, most especially body armor and force-field generators; also jetpacks, tear gas, stun guns, bolas, and other offensive devices. Until the start of the game, no team knew how well its arsenal compared with its rivals’—at least not officially. In point of fact, espionage was not only rife, the Commission encouraged it, as such intrigues inevitably increased each sphere’s clandestine largesse. Normally, the best-outfitted franchise won—the rules allowed only brief and intermittent alliances—and yet, just as the history of organized warfare contained instances of underdogs emerging victorious, from David’s trouncing of Goliath to North Vietnam’s humiliation of the United States, so did the annals of jesusball record a handful of famous upsets.

  “Here in the post-theistic age,” said Goneril, “securing its franchise a victory in the Deontology Bowl is the best way for a government to make its citizens feel proud.” She blew the foam off her beer. “Nobody knows exactly when ethical patriotism eclipsed the territorial variety, but that shift stands tall among the Stone Gospel’s many legacies.”

  Another unusual feature of the Deontology Bowl, Nora soon learned, was that it lasted twelve hours, from noon to midnight The idea of a sane person spending a whole day watching any sort of ball sport struck her as ridiculous—but then the game itself got under way, and she immediately became entranced. Although Goneril tried to explain the numerous rules, strategies, and rituals, the whole mêlée remained as opaque to Nora as a Noh drama. She didn’t mind. The surface aesthetics of jesusball, its peculiar mixture of ferocity and finesse, brutality and ballet, were enthralling in themselves.

  It was a contest of byzantine complexity, conducted on a rolling pasture twice the size of Central Park. Beyond many types of balls, the game employed pucks, discuses, Hoberman spheres, boomerangs, and shuttlecocks, all shunted about by means of sticks, bats, rackets, mallets, and air rifles toward targets that resembled baskets, hatch shells, bear traps, satellite dishes, and African termite hills. At any given moment, a franchise typically had sixty men and women on the field, their efforts focused simultaneously on three or four different goals. An army of referees was required to guarantee the fair awarding of points and penalties. Covering the event for home viewing must have been a television director’s nightmare. Split screen was the favored technique, supplemented by triptychs, fish-eye pans, helicopter shots, and instant replays.

  The entire clientele of Harry’s Sports Bar rose to its feet whenever the Confederated Provinces Capitalists scored a goal, whether it was against the EEC Marketeers, the Industrialized Asia Tigers, or the New Russia Consortium Bears. Blood pounding with chauvinistic ardor, the loyal fans cheered until the beer steins rattled on their trays. The fans’ patriotism was equally intense when the Capitalists executed a successful defensive play. Nora cheered too, not so much for the home team as for the fact that Gerard’s magnum opus held such marvelous power.

  In keeping with hallowed Deontology Bowl tradition, lunch and dinner both consisted of pizza, nachos, and chicken wings. Nora was about to dig into the second feast when to her great frustration the pulque evaporated from her neurons. The score stood at 311 points for the Tigers, 304 for the Capitalists, 298 for the Marketeers, and 290 for the Bears, with five hours left to play. A close game.

  “This isn’t fair,” she protested as Harry’s Sports Bar dissolved in a morass of green mist.

  “Life is like that,” said Goneril.

  “Do you know who’s going to win?” asked Nora, collapsing against the wall of the Maya temple.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Three billion wretches. The Stone Gospel must survive, Nora. Everything depends on it.”

  Whereas Anthony Van Horne likened their monotonous and debilitating life in El Agujero to the circumstances endured by pre-plague prison inmates, his wife believed their situation was even worse. As a charter member of the moribund Central Park West Enlightenment League, Cassie Fowler feared and mistrusted all enterprises that regarded themselves as churches. An institution that answered only to God ultimately answered to no one.

  “If you ask me, Lucido is nothing more than a fanatic with an education,” she said. “We should’ve stayed in New Orleans.”

  “Fanatic, maybe, but evidently he’s getting results,” said Anthony. “The logic is brilliant, don’t you think? Somatocism fills the abulic with hope, and the fetches lose their grip.”

  Cassie caressed her son and sneered. “The problem with most religions is that they sound reasonable while remaining irrational.”

  As their incarceration continued, the days congealing into weeks, the weeks into fortnights, Anthony found himself agreeing with his wife’s pessimism. But then, unexpectedly, on the last evening in February, a beefy functionary in a quasi-military uniform appeared—Leopold Dansk, Lucido’s chauffeur—and said he had orders to drive them to the psychoanalyst’s mansion on Mount Tapílula.

  “I thought the therapy happened in Tamoanchan,” said Cassie.

  “You’re thinking of the old cure. We have something more effective now, Antidote X, administered personally by Dr. Lucido.”

  Dansk commanded one of the few usable automobiles in Coatzacoalcos, a battered 1998 Lincoln Continental with mismatched tires and unlubricated brakes. He drove maniacally, slicing through the nocturnal fog at eighty miles an hour, so that Anthony and Cassie felt fortunate to reach the mansion alive. In the flagstone plaza a wiry man greeted them, Chief Deacon Hubbard Richter. With the exception of Cassie’s ex-fiancé, Oliver Shostak, Anthony had never before so intuitively disliked a person. Foreboding gripped his soul. The more he thought about this turn of events, the uglier it seemed. What exactly, was Antidote X? Why couldn’t Stevie receive the proven therapy instead?

  Following Richter’s instructions, Cassie lifted Stevie from the backseat and laid him in Anthony’s arms. Stevie’s diaper needed changing. Far more distressing was his mass: even with Dominic inhabiting him, the boy felt almost weightless, bones of bamboo. Richter led the party, chauffeur included, along a columned portico and into the mansion. They crossed the vestibule, its plaster walls decorated with murals depicting the Somatocist pantheon, then walked down a spiral staircase, the steel helix curling into the mountain’s core for two hundred and twenty steps.

  The cellar door stood open. Anthony saw hundreds of wine bottles lying in their racks like captives filling the hold of a slave ship. He stepped inside. Among the room’s several curiosities was a ponderous granite slab suggesting a primordial billiard table, a pre-Columbian calendar disk, a gigantic Olmec stone head, and two adjacent cages welded together from boiler plates and iron bars. The far cage was empty. The near one, padlocked, held a plague family: a gray-haired thected father and his middle-aged daughters, both women handcuffed and manifestly upset.

  “Why are they in a cage?” Cassie demanded.

  “Immortality is worth waiting for,” Richter replied unhelpfully.

  A familiar El Agujero functionary, Assistant Deacon Rola
nd Jackendorf, dressed as always in an olive business suit, strode into the wine cellar. Without warning, he lunged at Anthony and tore Stevie from his arms. Richter and Dansk joined the fracas; they manacled Anthony and slammed him against the calendar disk, as if attaching an hour hand to the face of a clock. When Cassie lurched toward her son, Richter produced a second pair of manacles, clamping them around her wrists. Anthony and Cassie were soon locked in the far cage, Stevie sprawled at their feet.

  “What the hell are you doing?” screamed Anthony.

  “Where’s Lucido?” shouted Cassie.

  Instead of answering, Richter, Dansk, and Jackendorf draped a green canvas tarpaulin over the cage. A sudden gloom descended.

  “Let us out, you fuckers!” yelled Anthony.

  “We want to see Lucido!” cried Cassie.

  Silence fell over the wine cellar. Anthony fixed on the tarpaulin, marred with a stain shaped like a ram’s head. The canvas stank of mildew. A cockroach scuttled across his boot. Depleted, depressed, Cassie sat down on the cage floor, a grid of rusted iron suggesting a sewer grating.

  The darkness augmented Anthony’s hearing, or so it seemed. As he tuned his ears to the events beyond the cage, footsteps announced the entry of a fourth antagonist—a formidable person, judging by the heavy tread. “I am Dr. Adrian Lucido,” the new arrival declared, presumably addressing the abulic’s daughters. “Let me begin by saying that while Antidote X is still experimental, its cure rate approaches one hundred percent. Initially you may find our methods perplexing, harsh even, but before long you will understand. Mr. Richter, kindly release the patient.” For Anthony, comprehending what followed was like interpreting the action in a radio drama. A metallic jangle: key into padlock. A squeaking sound: hinges rotating. A scraping noise: the patient being dragged from his cell. “Our objective is simple,” said Lucido. “We seek to transport your father to the Olmec paradise. First we lay him atop the sacred altar.” Scuffling noises and heavy breathing combined to give Anthony a mental picture of Lucido’s minions placing the old man on the slab. “Next we expose his chest”—cloth ripping—“and with this knife—”